I just, this moment, realized that yesterday was the anniversary of the day I walked out of the hospital in 2014 to begin life with AIDS. I am now a 7-year AIDS survivor.

There are flavors of irony in this moment all mixing together as I contemplate this conjunction of events. First and most immediate of these is that I’m currently lying naked on my bed with another man’s load of semen in my cunt, so fresh it hasn’t even had time to start leaking out. Ironic, on this day, that they call it ‘getting lucky’.

It’s ironic that I started this seven-year ordeal, I believe, in much the same position as I was in half an hour ago, bent over taking a rutting up my ass by a gang of men. Ironic that I mark the moment with a confirmation that Fate has intended me to serve this way, and that perhaps there was ultimately no avoiding what happened to me...or what I’ve become...or what this will eventually lead me to.

It’s ironic that just before I got just now, I took the bandage off my shoulder from where I was just injected with my third dose of Pfizer’s vaccine against COVID - a booster I need because my immune system is impaired. Ironic because today, in the second year of the pandemic, I’m alive and living with an incurable virus thanks to an infectious disease doctor who saved my life seven years ago - and lost hers to the coronavirus last year even as she tried to defeat it. Rest in peace, good doctor,

By any measure, I’m lucky to be alive - the Enemy Virus came very close to finishing its work with me in 2014. By the time I learned it was within me, my immune system had already been destroyed. Not enough of it remained to ward off the pneumonia, the fungal meningitis, the strokes that nearly ended me. But I was lucky - by a chance of anatomy, the circulatory system in my brain was able to prevent the strokes from doing serious damage.

 I was lucky - my immune system began trying to rebuild itself, and in time it was able to beat back the infections of molluscum and thrush that most people never have to contend with. The price to be paid for rebooting your immune system, though, is sometimes it forgets the battles it already fought, and the result is shingles even though you had chicken pox 40 years ago. Luckily, I got through it all, got newly immunized, and now I’m as healthy as a 54-year-old man with AIDS can expect to be. My HIV doctor even tells me now that my life expectancy isn’t as curtailed as was thought - it’s probably getting closer to what a neg person’s would be... though it’s still shorter. But it could have been very much shorter. Lucky to be alive, seven years on.

Alive as a pandemic ravages a world that is inexorably heating up and becoming more populated, more polarized, more polluted and less livable by the day.

Lucky me.

...As you can probably tell, I am definitely am not getting fucked enough these days. 😐